Campbell Island’s Shetlanders

In the early 20th Century an attempt was made to farm sheep on Campbell Island (Moto Ihupuku) in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Campbell Island lies in the subantarctic, 400 or so miles south of Te Waipounamu/ the South Island. It is windswept, and mountainous, and is almost bisected by a long fiord called Perseverance Harbour that opens out on the east coast of this, the main island in the Campbell Island grouping. The isle is the closest land to the antipodes of the UK and Ireland and, in fact, Limerick in Ireland is the furthest city in the world from this remote part of New Zealand.

Campbell Island is uninhabited, at least as far as humans are concerned. While there is possible archaeological evidence that there was Polynesian settlement in the Auckland Islands, also part of the Subantarctic region, in the 13th Century, Campbell Island has had no such discovery. Maybe people came to it before Captain Frederick Hasselborough of the Perseverance in 1810 but it is difficult to prove any visits prior to that. Upon the Captain’s arrival he named the island after Elizabeth Macquarie, née Campbell, the wife of the Governor of New South Wales, Lachlan Macquarie. (New Zealand then did not have its own Governor and was a dependency of New South Wales.) It is a coincidence that the Perseverance was owned by the unrelated Robert Campbell & Co.

These days Campbell Island is a designated nature reserve, having been gazetted in 1954 and in 1998, along with all the other New Zealand Subantarctic Islands, became a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It is an important sanctuary for birds, invertebrates, marine mammals, and plants, with the world’s most remote tree, a Sitka Spruce that was believed to have been planted by Lord Ranfurly in the early 20th Century, being proposed by Australian academics as a marker for the start of the Anthropocene age.

One of the tasks necessary to create the reserve that protects native species was to remove introduced, invasive life. Over the years that the island was used for seal hunting – the Perseverance was a sealing brig – and for farming, rats, cattle and sheep were brought ashore where they became feral. It was only in 1992 that the last sheep were culled after more than twenty years of a programme to get rid of them. Campbell Island cows were finally eradicated in the mid-1980s and brown rats were, in the largest rat eradication programme in the world, exterminated early on in the new millennium. This has had a profound effect on life on the island with native birds making a comeback through reintroduction and migration, and plants and invertebrates recovering.

In the early years of the 20th Century, Shetland played a part in the history of this island. During the latter part of the previous decades sheep farming was tried and William Tucker, a leaseholder who had run 511 on the map above, laid plans in the 1900s to bring Shetlanders to Campbell Island in the mistaken belief that the conditions there were similar to those in Shetland. He was of the opinion that Shetland men were well-suited to the rigours of such a place and that they could make a go of sheep farming. It became apparent a few years into the venture that this was not the case. Campbell Island was too difficult a place to make a return on investment with sheep and the Shetlanders left by 1908. A mixed venture of sheep farming and whaling followed but by 1931 farming of cattle and sheep had ceased, due in part to the Great Depression ending what was already a very difficult proposition.

Read more:

Campbell Island listing on Heritage New Zealand

UNESCO listing